Summer beckons with new books ready for you to investigate. Here’s some of the newest summer crop to get you started with great reads:
Sophie Hannah’s The Telling Error is her newest entry in the Zailer/Waterhouse series, an unconventional procedural set in England, where the action centers on a participant in the murder.
Nicki Clements is the unlikely focus pulled in for questioning after the unusual murder in her neighborhood of a controversial columnist. Nicki is an easy liar, a woman who holds secrets of her own, but she’s not a murderer. How she’s gotten herself deeply into trouble, and the reasons behind her inability to tell the truth and to fabricate stories, all converge into this tale that has the feel of a nightmare too easily imagined by the average person.
Here’s Nicki in her own words: “This is the thing about deception that some people forget: its practitioners don’t do it solely for their own sakes. Often they do it to make others happy. It’s embedded in the training programme we liars o through; we see that when we tell the truth, our instructors scowl, raise their voices, turn red in the face. Anyone who cares more about pleasing other people than about their own happiness–anyone who believes, deep down, that everyone else matters more than they do–learns fluent dishonesty at a young age.”
Award-winning Hannah has developed the art of telling a story that resonates with readers for her ability to decipher human emotions and actions. Her first Poirot novel will be published this fall.
In her fifth Maeve Kerrigan mystery, Jane Casey’s The Stranger You Know brings readers the newest case for the London detective. Three women have been brutally murdered and arranged in a ritualistic manner. Each has had her eyes cut out, their hair sheared off, and lie on a bed or flowers.
The killings echo a death from the past of Maeve’s partner, DCI Josh Derwent, the frustrating man she admires at the same time as he exasperates her with his unprofessional remarks and hot temper. Now she must decide if this man she works beside is wrongfully accused of murder–or if he’s being framed in a most horrendous manner.
A vibrant addition to the series, Kerrigan’s frailties in terms of her own relationships add to the mix.
Journalist Julia Dahl makes her crime fiction debut with the riveting Invisible City.
Using her experience in several areas, she bring to life an new protagonist readers will want to follow: Rebekah Roberts, born to a Hasidic Jewish mother from Brooklyn and the Christian preacher from Florida who raised her. Rebekah takes a job in New York to bring her closer to the mother who abandoned her as an infant, convinced her motives are to be in the center of the journalistic scene.
Working as a stringer she’s called to cover the story when the body of a Hasidic woman is found brutally murdered in a junk yard. Calling into question the NYPD’s relationship with the ultra-Orthodox community, she’s shocked to learn the woman will be buried without an autopsy, her husband never questioned by police. She’s determined to find the truth, and perhaps along the way, unravel a thread that may lead to her mother. Original and readable.
Denise Mina’s Alex Morrow series finds the mother of young twins investigating the death of a businessman, only to discover a complicated network of corruption and deceit that reaches back to the Glasgow to the night Princess Diana died, when a 14 yr old girl found herself sitting in a car with a dead body and the murder weapon in her hand.
How Morrow uncovers the real story, and finds a murderer, make for compelling reading in the unsentimental but very well-written series that never shirks at the realities in our world.
Leigh Russell’s Geraldine Steel series has been reviewed here before. The newest addition, Stop Dead, finds Steel in her Met job in London, investigating the murder of a highly successful and unorthodox businessman. At first the victim’s business partner are prime suspects–until he, too, is killed in the same gruesome manner, and Morrow races to find the culprit with only one clue in hand: DNA that leads to two women, one dead and the other in prison.
Russell brings back Steel’s former partner, DS Ian Peterson, in his own series in Cold Sacrifice. Still adjusting to marriage and thinking he may have made a mistake, Peterson’s newest case will take him away from his bride more than ever when three dead bodies pile up quickly. When the first victim, a middle-class housewife, is found stabbed in a nearby park, her husband comes under suspicions, but is soon cleared. That is, until the prostitute who gave him an alibi turns up dead, followed soon by the murder of another prostitute. Peterson will have his hands full trying to placate his wife at home while devoting his time to unearthing a killer.
The husband and wife duo of Nicci French have a winner in the Frieda Klein series. Waiting for Wednesday finds a weakened Frieda recuperating from the events that ended Tuesday’s Gone and have left her with physical and emotional wounds. Then DCI Karlsson asked her insights when a health visitor and mother of three is found dead in her home, the victim of a horrific attack. When her niece befriends one of the teens left motherless, Frieda finds the answers may lie closer to home than she thinks. And she’s very aware of her own teeming emotions and fragility, which affects her impulsive actions on several fronts. Another satisfying entry in the series.
New to Auntie M but not new to Swedish fans everywhere, Kjell Eriksson’s Ann Lindell series brings the fifth entry, Black Lies, Red Blood. With an interesting protagonist, the female police inspector finds her newest case coming too close to home, when the journalist she’s been having an affair with is implicated in the murder of a homeless man. After his disappearance, Ann must decide if the man she’s fallen in love with could be a killer, while keeping the news of their relationship from her colleagues as she searches for another explanation. Filled with psychological and descriptive details.
Stephen Booth’s wonderful Fry and Cooper series returns with Kill Call,this time exploring the world of hunting and horses.
The case presents in a strange way, when on a rainy Derbyshire moor, hounds from the local foxhunt find the body of a well-dressed man whose head has been crushed. Yet an anonymous caller has reported the same body lying half a mile away.
DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper investigate and find themselves embroiled in the violent world of hunting and the saboteurs against it, Throw in horse theft and a connection to the meat trade and you have a mystery. Fry tries to unwind the complex and shady business interests of the murder victim, while Cooper decided that the answer to the case just might lie deep in the past.
History is everywhere around him in the Peak District landscape — particularly in the ‘plague village’ of Eyam, where an outbreak of Black Death has been turned into a modern-day tourist attraction. Cooper can’t ignore the instinct that tells him this is at the heart of the case.
New in paperback and in ebook from Witness Impulse, one of the slower-paced books in the series but nonetheless with an interesting and arresting case to follow.
Also from Witness Impulse, the 10th Ben Cooper/Diane Fry Booth, Lost River; previously reviewed. This strong entry in the popular Peak District series revolves around a May Bank Holiday ruined by the tragic drowning of an eight-year-old girl in picturesque Dovedale. For DC Ben Cooper, a helpless witness to the tragedy, the incident is not only traumatic, but leads him to become involved in the tangled lives of the Neilds, the dead girl’s family.
Cooper begins to suspect that one of them is harbouring a secret – a secret that the whole family might be willing to cover up. DS Diane Fry finds herself drawn into an investigation of her own among the inner-city streets of Birmingham, and quickly Fry realises there is only one person she can rely on to provide the help she needs, and that’s Ben Cooper.
Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff 